The Implications of Transnationalism

first para: When Kritika published a special issue in 2001 on the state of the field ten years after the end of communism, it was logical to include a reassessment of the October Revolution and two pieces on the rapidly developing investigation of the Stalin period. Transnational history went unmentioned, along with international and comparative approaches, for they did not yet appear crucial to the state of the field. If “culture” was “everywhere” in the Russian history of the 1990s, talk of the transnational became ubiquitous in the 2000s. In retrospect, however, the first post-Soviet decade laid the groundwork for the proliferation of cross-border and cross-cultural approaches by furthering a closely related phenomenon: intensive investigation of comparative dimensions to Russian and Soviet history

Intellectuals and Communism

first para: Grappling with the relationship between intellectuals and communism after 1917 calls to mind two topics long treated as almost entirely distinct. The first concerns non-Soviet, generally noncommunist intellectuals around the world and, in particular, intense twentieth-century debates over the pro-Soviet “fellow travelers” in the decades after 1917. The second concerns the role and place of intellectuals living and working under communism itself as a new, postrevolutionary intelligentsia emerged. The two topics have been divorced from one another not only because they were studied by historians in separated fields, but because the differences between them seemed obvious. Foreign intellectuals, wooed as sympathizers or potential allies by the organs of Soviet cultural diplomacy, parts of the Comintern, and the party-state, were outsiders not infrequently distant from the workings of the secretive Soviet system. Under Stalinism, the most pro-Soviet of them – known as fellow travelers abroad and “friends of the Soviet Union” at home – were celebrated rather than repressed. “Domestic” intellectuals, by contrast, were directly enmeshed in the political, cultural, scientific, and ideological dimensions of Soviet power during a period when the intelligentsia and culture were drastically remade. In the most hackneyed, Cold War-era renditions of these two topics, foreign fellow travelers were naive dupes or “useful idiots” (an apocryphal phase attributed to Lenin), while the Soviet intellectuals were either dissident martyrs or “hacks.

Russian-­‐Soviet Modernity: None, Shared, Alternative, or Entangled?

Orig. English version of NLO article translated and published in Russian translation as: “Modernost’ v Rossii i SSSR: otsutstvuiushchaia, obshchaia, al’ternativnaia, perepletennaia?”

Biophysical mechanisms of frequency-dependence and its neuromodulation in neurons in oscillatory networks

In response to oscillatory input, many isolated neurons exhibit a preferred frequency response in their voltage amplitude and phase shift. Membrane potential resonance (MPR), a maximum amplitude in a neuron’s input impedance at a non-zero frequency, captures the essential subthreshold properties of a neuron, which may provide a coordinating mechanism for organizing the activity of oscillatory neuronal networks around a given frequency. In the pyloric central pattern generator network of the crab Cancer borealis, for example, the pacemaker group pyloric dilator neurons show MPR at a frequency that is correlated with the network frequency. This dissertation uses the crab pyloric CPG to examine how, in one neuron type, interactions of ionic currents, even when expressed at different levels, can produce consistent MPR properties, how MPR properties are modified by neuromodulators and how such modifications may lead to distinct functional effects at different network frequencies. In the first part of this dissertation it is demonstrated that, despite the extensive variability of individual ionic currents in a neuron type such as PD, these currents can generate a consistent impedance profile as a function of input frequency and therefore result in stable MPR properties. Correlated changes in ionic current parameters are associated with the dependence of MPR on the membrane potential range. Synaptic inputs or neuromodulators that shift the membrane potential range can modify the interaction of multiple resonant currents and therefore shift the MPR frequency. Neuromodulators change the properties of voltage-dependent ionic currents. Since ionic current interactions are nonlinear, the modulation of excitability and the impedance profile may depend on all ionic current types expressed by the neuron. MPR is generated by the interaction of positive and negative feedback effects due to fast amplifying and slower resonant currents. Neuromodulators can modify existing MPR properties to generate antiresonance (a minimum amplitude response). In the second part of this dissertation, it is shown that the neuropeptide proctolin produces antiresonance in the follower lateral pyloric neuron, but not in the PD neuron. This finding is inconsistent with the known influences of proctolin. However, a novel proctolin-activated ionic current is shown to produce the antiresonance. Using linear models, antiresonance is then demonstrated to amplify MPR in synaptic partner neurons, indicating a potential function in the pyloric network. Neuromodulators are state dependent, so that their action may depend on the prior activity history of the network. It is shown that state-dependence may arise in part from the time-dependence of an inactivating inward current targeted by the neuromodulator proctolin. Due to the kinetics of inactivation, this current advances the burst phase and increases the duty cycle of the neuron, but mainly at higher network frequencies. These results demonstrate that the effect of neuromodulators on MPR in individual neuron types depends on the nonlinear interaction of modulator-activated and other ionic currents as well as the activation of currents with frequency-dependent properties. Consequently, the action of neuromodulators on the output of oscillatory networks may depend on the frequency of oscillations and be predictable from the MPR properties of the network neurons

"Syncretic Subcultures or Stalinism without Stalin? Soviet Partisans as Communities of Violence"

Discusses works on partisans, including: Cerovic, Masha. Les Enfants de Staline: La guerre des partisans soviétiques (1941–1944). L’Univers historique. Paris: Le Seuil, 2018. 366 pp. €25.00. ISBN 978-2-0211-2167-4. Kudriashov, S. V., ed. Partizanskoe dvizhenie v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny. Vestnik Arkhiva Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii. Moscow: Istoricheskaia literatura, 2015. 689 pp. $75.00. ISBN 978-5-9906493-1-6

Bolshevik Millenarianism as Academic Blockbuster

Critical review essay on Slezkine's "House of Government," its millenarian thesis, and the emergent genre of academic blockbuster to which it belongs

Bolted joint studies in GRP

Thesis (Nav. E.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Ocean Engineering, 1994, and Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Materials Sciences & Engineering, 1994.Vita.Includes bibliographical references (leaves ).by David M. Fox.M.S.Nav.E